January 1961
It is remarked in the excellent preface to this astonishing book that on one level it is a thriller, with all the excitements of danger, pursuit, suspense, capture and escape - an account of adventures which rip the reader from its first sentence to the end. This is true. It is also a piece of autobiography - written now, by a European - the times being 1949 -1957.
In 1949, Silvin Craciunas escaped from his native Roumania with the secret police after him and a price on his head. He spent a year in Paris, where he met and fell in love with his future wife, but his National Committee asked him to go back into Roumania to organise further resistance and escapes. That he accepted this invitation - knowing so well what was involved - offers some clue to the quality of his nature and courage. For six months he carried out his mission, constantly hunted by the police, and continuously in danger of being betrayed by friends under arrest and torture. Then, just as he is ready to leave again, he is caught.
He is subjected to a concentrated and scientific interrogation, and when that fails, to torture. The torture and interrogation - the former running a frightful gamut of sadistic ingenuity - alternate for four years. At the end of this time his captors have failed utterly to extract a single betrayal or any other information, but his health has broken down, and when an attempt at torturing him by electric shocks results in prolonged fainting, he is taken to a hospital for medical examination, in order that his interrogators may determine exactly how much pressure can be put upon him without killing him outright. As soon as he realises why he is in hospital, he takes advantage of three clear minutes when he is not watched to escape. It is dark and raining, he does not know the country and is very much afraid of a haemorrhage from his infected lung, but he runs far enough to board a goods train, carrying timber at twenty miles an hour, south.
Then follow nerve-wracking months of hiding, pursuit, near capture and flight, until two years later, he manages to cross the border of Hungary and thence to Vienna.
These are the barest outlines of events inside which are contained the bones of the oldest and most triumphant adventure; the human spirit surmounting all fear, pain, imprisonment and despair; proving its life and growth in spite of every material force directed towards its destruction; achieving a liberty and bliss which bodily privation did not influence - which drove away the longing for death, and strengthened the resolution to keep silent, to live and to escape. It is clear that this state was achieved through steadfast courage in a situation as horrible (only continuing for months on end) as the worst moments of a nightmare, but possibly its greatest value lies in it not being legend, or theory, or myth but one living man’s actual example and experience.
I must add that the book seems to me admirably composed; the quantity of peopled encountered in it, and the necessarily complicated geography of the author’s movements are all most simply explicit, and beyond or outside the personal experience one is struck by the picture of a country wracked by terror, misery, agonising gallantry and loss which seem to mark all Communist encroachment. This is a book which I found passionately interesting and which moved me very much.